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Industry & Manufacturing

The Museum's collections document centuries of remarkable changes in products, manufacturing processes, and the role of industry in American life. In the bargain, they preserve artifacts of great ingenuity, intricacy, and sometimes beauty.

The carding and spinning machinery built by Samuel Slater about 1790 helped establish the New England textile industry. Nylon-manufacturing machinery in the collections helped remake the same industry more than a century later. Machine tools from the 1850s are joined by a machine that produces computer chips. Thousands of patent models document the creativity of American innovators over more than 200 years.

The collections reach far beyond tools and machines. Some 460 episodes of the television series Industry on Parade celebrate American industry in the 1950s. Numerous photographic collections are a reminder of the scale and even the glamour of American industry.

This patent model demonstrates an invention for a double bed-and-platen power press with a frisket at each end and is considered an unnumbered patent. The bed was raised by toggles beneath against the fixed platen. This patent provided the basis for the single-ended Adams Power Press, a well-loved iron machine later produced by R. Hoe & Co. In the 1870s it was still considered to produce finer letterpress work than any other machine on the market. It was pre-eminently a book press. Isaac Adams (1803-1883), with no schooling but ample inventive genius, introduced his power press at the age of 25 and derived his living from its success.

Almost from the moment of the mechanical clock's invention, the local clock tower on a church or other public building dominated the landscape. Tower clocks announced the time to people within earshot of their bells and regulated urban life in the Western world. The introduction of the pendulum and the anchor escapement in the late seventeenth century made these clocks remarkably accurate. They were set at local noon (when the sun reached its highest point in the sky at a particular location), and thus gave each town a time of its own, depending on its longitude.

In America, before specialized manufacturers began mass-producing tower clocks in the second half of the nineteenth century, the clocks were built to order by versatile individual clockmakers and, occasionally, by adventurous blacksmiths. The tower clock shown here is one of the few built by Simon Willard (1753-1848) of Boston, the most famous of the many clockmaking members of the Willard family. Willard was inventive as well as prolific, a clockmaker who worked not only for a regional clientele but also for Thomas Jefferson and the outfitters of the U.S. Capitol.

Marked "Made in 1832 by Simon Willard in his 80th year," this tower clock served for more than a century on the First (Unitarian) Parish in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In all details the movement shows uncompromising craftsmanship. It has a pinwheel dead-beat escapement with maintaining power and a rack-and-snail hour striking train.

The depression of 1837 hit Connecticut clock manufacturers so hard that they feared the entire industry might collapse. On a trip to Virginia to collect old bills, Chauncey Jerome--a successful clock producer from Bristol, Connecticut, and a disciple of Eli Terry—had a new idea. A simple, weight-driven, one-day clock made of brass, he thought, could be produced far more cheaply and in much greater quantities than the standard wooden clock. When he returned home, he described the idea to his brother Noble. Noble Jerome, a talented clockmaker, quickly made a prototype and received a U.S. patent on it in 1839.

By that time, mechanized production of clock movements was already underway and would soon reach unprecedented numbers. Whereas the typical factory might produce several thousand wooden clocks per year, the Jeromes--and their principal imitators and rivals--were soon mass-producing brass clocks in the hundreds of thousands. For these brass clocks, Chauncey Jerome adopted a simple case introduced by several other New England clockmakers. The case became famous as the "Ogee" for its characteristic S-shaped moldings.

Unlike wooden clocks, brass movements were unaffected by humidity and could be transported by ship. The entire world, clockmakers quickly recognized, was a potential market. The reception Chauncey Jerome's clocks received in England, home of some of the world's finest clockmakers, illustrates the impact of his innovation. When the first clocks traveled arrived in 1842, valued at an improbable $1.50 each, English customs inspectors assumed that Jerome had set the figure far below cost to avoid paying the proper duties. To teach Jerome a lesson, the inspectors bought the whole shipment at the declared price. When a similar cargo at the same valuation arrived a few days later, they did the same. Only with the third shipment did they recognize that they were unwittingly becoming distributors for Yankee clock manufacturers. Jerome was content with the prices British customs agents had been paying him and would have happily supplied them indefinitely. From then on Jerome's clocks entered the English market unimpeded. Over the next twenty years, in part because of American competition, the British clock industry declined to near extinction.

This model was submitted to the U.S. Patent Office with the application for the patent issued to William H. Baker and Samuel H. Baldwin, of Cohoes, New York, August 21, 1839, no. 1295.

This is an early example of a steam engine in which two cams turn together in a closed casing so that steam admitted to the casing will force apart abutments on the cams and cause the cams and the shafts on which they are mounted to turn. This engine may also be used as a pump.

Reference:

This description comes from the 1939 Catalog of the Mechanical Collections of the Division of Engineering United States Museum Bulletin 173 by Frank A. Taylor.

This model was submitted to the U.S. Patent Office with the application for the patent granted to William A. Lighthall, of Albany, New York, April 14, 1838, no. 696.

The engine is designed primarily for boat propulsion and permits the use of a horizontal steam cylinder installed low within the boat in combination with a beam working vertically as in a beam engine.

The model is diagrammatic in form, is made of wood, and is not complete. The engine represented is essentially a beam engine laid upon its side so that the cylinder is horizontal and the beam is supported vertically. The patent drawing shows the cylinder placed directly upon the keelson of a boat with the beam held so that the lower end is at the approximate level of the center of the cylinder. A long connecting rod attached to the upper end of the beam reaches back over the cylinder to a crank on the engine shaft, which is located above the cylinder and back of it.

Reference:

This description comes from the 1939 Catalog of the Mechanical Collections of the Division of Engineering United States Museum Bulletin 173 by Frank A. Taylor.